Selling the U.S., by George!

By Ed Magnuson

Hoping to reassure allies, Bush tours Europe and Shultz visits Asia

Vice President George Bush was in West Berlin, the Communist-encircled outpost where American leaders often enjoy ovations. In the mirrored ballroom of the Inter-Continental Hotel, his delivery was crisp, almost inspirational, as he told some 650 politicians, businessmen and military officers what they wanted to hear. "We are not preparing to fight a nuclear war. We are preparing to deter war. An attack on you is an attack on us." The U.S., said Bush, is ready "to consider and explore any and all reasonable Soviet offers at the negotiating table in Geneva."

Then, as his listeners sipped Riesling wine and broke bread rolls to stave off predinner hunger pangs, Bush unveiled his piece de resistance: a letter from President Reagan to "the people of Europe." It said: "Just as our allies can count on the United States to defend Europe at all cost, you can count on us to spare no effort to reach a fair and meaningful agreement that will reduce the Soviet nuclear threat. I have asked Vice President Bush to propose to Soviet General Secretary Andropov that he and I meet wherever and whenever he wants in order to sign an agreement banning U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range land-based nuclear missile weapons from the face of the earth." Bush's audience rose and applauded loudly.

Yuri Andropov called the Reagan letter a "propaganda game" and said that it contained "nothing new." In effect, Reagan had made the summit meeting contingent on Andropov's accepting the President's "zero option" proposal, under which the U.S. would cancel plans to deploy 572 Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe starting late this year if the Soviet Union dismantles all 342 of its SS-20 missiles, most of which are aimed at Europe. Said Andropov: "That it is patently unacceptable to the Soviet Union is already generally recognized."

The next day, Reagan acknowledged there was more show than substance to his letter. When reporters aboard Air Force One en route to St. Louis asked whether he was trying to send new signals to the Kremlin through his letter, the President replied with startling candor. "No," he said, "I was simply responding to their vast propaganda effort."

The Soviet Union has, indeed, been waging a skillful peace offensive depicting the U.S. as the obstacle to progress on arms control at the Intermediate-range Nuclear Force (INF) negotiations and Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), both of which are under way in Geneva. In sending Bush to Europe and Secretary of State George Shultz to Japan, China and South Korea, the Administration was trying last week to counter the Soviet p.r. blitz with some salesmanship of its own. The American emissaries carried no fresh initiatives of real substance. Instead, they sought to reassure America's allies with friendly rhetoric and promises of flexibility on both arms control and other tender issues. To a large extent, each man succeeded, though Reagan's loose talk about propaganda undercut Bush.

The Vice President's mission--to persuade the NATO allies that the U.S. is sincere about wanting an equitable agreement with the Soviets on nuclear missiles in Europe--was clearly the most difficult. In the abstract, Reagan's zero option is a proposal that nearly everyone in Western Europe would embrace as a major step toward nuclear stability. The trouble is, the zero option has zero chance for acceptance at the INF talks. From the Soviet perspective, it ignores the 162 missiles in France and Britain and asks the Kremlin to dismantle missiles that are already deployed in return for paper reductions by the U.S.

For his part, Andropov has offered an equally tendentious deal, in which the U.S. would cancel its deployment of 108 Pershing II and 464 cruise missiles, while the Soviets cut their SS-20 arsenal to the level of the French and British nuclear forces. The U.S. has rejected this, since the British and French missiles are not under American control. The Reagan letter reinforced the impression that the U.S. is locked into the zero option, even at a time when Bush was stressing U.S. willingness to consider any "reasonable" Soviet proposals.

Undaunted, Bush faced his European challenge with all the zeal of a man who would like to be President. His well-turned speech in Berlin, stressing the "moral" value of the zero option, was a crowd pleaser, deftly designed to buttress the political fortunes of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a strong advocate of the new U.S. missile deployments in West Germany. Kohl is facing a serious challenge from Social Democrat Hans-Jochen Vogel in the parliamentary elections on March 6.

In a hurried, 24-hour visit to The Netherlands, Bush attended a dinner presided over by Queen Beatrix, and met with a group of prominent businessmen. He spent one hour chatting with members of the U.S. embassy staff in The Hague, and thus was criticized when he claimed that he could not spare five minutes to meet with an influential Dutch antinuclear weapons lobby, the Inter-Church Peace Council. Nonetheless, Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers proclaimed that he would judge progress at the INF talks by "only one criterion: the zero option."

Bush then flew into Brussels, where security was tight and the welcome of Prime Minister Wilfried Martens was warm. The Vice President pointedly recalled that the decision to deploy the Pershing II and cruise missiles had been made in Belgium three years ago, largely at the urging of the Europeans. Their hope, Bush said, was "to restore the balance that the Soviet Union has upset by reserving unto itself a dangerous monopoly of intermediate-range land-based nuclear weapons." Bush emphasized that the Kremlin's strategy was aimed at disrupting NATO unity by exploiting European doubts about accepting the new missiles. Martens readily agreed that "the solidarity within the Alliance is of the utmost importance."

Bush dined with Belgium's King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola at their Laeken Palace. Next day he attended a round of closed meetings with NATO officials, including Secretary General Joseph Luns. Bush met in Geneva with the Soviet Union's top arms negotiators, Yuli Kvitsinsky, who heads the INF team, and Victor P. Karpov, the START leader. Karpov said the meeting was useful in "clarifying positions." In a speech to the United Nations Committee on Disarmament, Bush challenged Soviet negotiators to "come up with your plan to banish these INF missiles."

The other traveling George, Secretary of State Shultz, faced a less demanding task in Tokyo, where Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone had only recently returned from a cordial trip to Washington. Still, Shultz found the issue of Euromissiles much on the mind of his host. Partly because the U.S. has urged Japan to play a larger role in the military security of the Far East, Nakasone has depicted his island as "an unsinkable aircraft carrier" and called the Soviet Union his nation's major foreign threat. Japanese leaders thus worry about any Geneva deal under which the Soviet Union would agree to move some of its missiles into Asia rather than dismantle them. Shultz reassured Nakasone that the zero option calls on the Soviets to dismantle all 243 of its SS-20s in Europe as well as the 99 already in Asia. Shultz vowed that U.S. negotiators would never "do something that is good for Europe but not good for Asia." While that may have comforted Nakasone, giving Japan a virtual voice in the European missile debate could severely restrict U.S. flexibility in Geneva.

Then it was on to China, where Shultz said the purpose of his four-day visit to Peking was simply to "correct misunderstandings--or at least to talk out what our differences are." He and his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian, spent eight hours doing just that. Wu put an arm on Shultz's shoulder at one point and declared, "And now we are friends." Shultz also had a talk with Premier Zhao Ziyang and with China's top leader, Deng Xiaoping. That meeting, which lasted 2 1/2 hrs., was described by Shultz as "penetrating and worthwhile." Differences over Taiwan, trade and relations with developing nations were discussed candidly but left unresolved. Shultz apparently cleared the way for Premier Zhao to visit Reagan in Washington later this year. A return trip by Reagan to Peking did not seem likely.

At a rare press conference with American reporters, Zhao said bluntly that "the main obstacle [to better U.S.China relations] is the question of Taiwan." On that issue Shultz and Zhao both refused to give ground. Shultz insisted that the U.S. could not go beyond Reagan's "Taiwan Communique" issued last August. It promised that the U.S. will gradually reduce arms sales to Taiwan at an unspecified pace and quantity, a pledge far too vague to satisfy China, though not so vague as to alarm Taiwan.

Lesser, but nonetheless sticky, differences over China's desire to import high-technology equipment from the U.S. and American restrictions against textile imports from China were not resolved either. The normally imperturbable Shultz seemed testy on trade issues. At a lunch with U.S. businessmen in Peking, Shultz rejected complaints that the Government was moving too slowly to improve trade with China. "Sometimes the problems are created by you," snapped Shultz. "They're your problem. Don't complain to the Government." And if they think European governments are more helpful in expediting trade with China, he added, "why don't you move to Western Europe?"

On the delicate strategic issue of China's relations with the Soviet Union, Zhao said that he hoped for "a breakthrough" when the two sides meet in Moscow next month. But in private talks, Shultz apparently detected no real determination by his hosts to develop closer ties with Moscow. Aides traveling with Shultz indicated, somewhat surprisingly, that the Administration was inclined to downplay China's importance in the global strategic picture.

The Shultz visit, in fact, did little to warm the official coolness between Washington and Peking, and the visiting Americans seemed quite content to maintain that distance. This was a sharp break from the "opening to China" zeal during the Nixon and Carter Administrations.

While both Shultz in Asia and Bush in Europe effectively presented U.S. foreign policy positions in places where those policies have been criticized, both operated within the limits of mainly restating old arguments. That needed to be done, perhaps, but salesmanship cannot really substitute for creative American proposals. More substantive diplomacy will be required if the U.S. is to ensure that the deployment issue does not pull apart the NATO alliance and that the Taiwan question does not permanently poison relations with the People's Republic.

--By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Roland Flamini/Berlin and Johanna McGeary with Shultz

With reporting by Roland Flamini, Johanna McGeary, Shultz This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.